Agony Can be Beautiful – A Conversation with Richard Lawrence

A couple weeks ago my friend Gemma Lynx (check her out here and at RebelMayhem.com as well as MyFreeCams and ManyVids) posted a video of her masturbating from the chest up for sale through her store. Anyway, I told her that I thought the clip was a great idea because I love seeing a person’s face, especially other women, when they orgasm. It is just so real and amazing in my opinion. Well, she said that there was actually a whole site called BeautifulAgony.com that shows videos of just that.

I rushed right over to the site and sure enough it was everything she said it was. The site is filled with women, men and couples just enjoying the experience of orgasmic bliss for us to enjoy and at $8 a month a pretty good bargain. There’s pretty much no nudity though so don’t expect to see any of that if you decide to check it out. Now because I found all these fascinating I decided to contact them to see if they would be interested in taking a little time to answer a few questions. So here it is, a short conversation with a founder of the site, Richard Lawrence.

Hello Richard, for those who might not know you please let us know you are and please describe yourself?

My name is Richard Lawrence and I’m a former engineer and inventor from Australia. I’m also a hack photographer and producer of socially responsible erotica.

Your website BeautifulAgony.com features videos of women and men having orgasms but only showing them from the face up. How did youcome up with this concept?

It was a joint brainstorm in 2004 with a friend of mine, Lauren, who had just graduated with an arts degree at the time. We both had an interest in sexy things, but found porn to be too contrived to turn us on. We thought, what if we could film people having actual orgasms, would that be sexy? And to prove it, let’s not have any nudity, just the face, and see if it works. We lent a camera to four friends, I think three females and one male, and asked them to film their faces during orgasm. What came back was, we agreed, very erotic, so we published them on a plain white website and emailed the URL to a few people we thought might be interested. It took off very quickly so we decided to turn it into a paysite.

Another unique aspect of your site is that the clips are from regular everyday people. What were your concerns when you decided to go thatroute instead of bringing in people to shoot?

Not at all, in fact that was essential to the idea. Let me say at this point that I have great respect and admiration for the work adult performers do and I also understand why they need to,mostly, fake their orgasms, but we wanted to prove that the opposite of porn could be sexier than porn, so we chose people who had no connections with the adult industry at all.

Under the right conditions most people seem to be able to come even with a camera over their head and the conditions don’t get any better than the privacy of your own room, so we were lending cameras and tripods to interested contributors. These days most of our submissions get uploaded from people around the world we’ve never met, which is awesome.

For anyone that might be interested in submitting one, what kind of things do you look for in the submitted clips?

Authenticity, primarily. There are little signs that the orgasm is real; bulging veins in the neck, a flush in the chest, breath spasms. We don’t knock anyone back unless they’re not taking the project seriously, or are obviously faking, but the most popular videos share an involuntary loss of control, a sense that the person you’re watching has momentarily lost all higher brain function. We also love a bit of mystery, the signs that someone else is there, out of the frame, assisting their partner to climax. If there’s an obvious performance, if the person seems to be putting a show on for the camera, we wouldn’t accept it.

One other thing I noticed is that, at least in the ones I watched, there was no nudity. Is that a conscious decision on your part or isit just something that the submitters did on their own?

We made a decision right at the start that nudity would be a distraction, so it’s a firm rule, and we edit out anything that comes into frame, although apparently a couple of nipples have slipped past the editor’s eagle eye lately. I’m looking into that!

What plans do you have for the future of the site? Anything new or exciting on the horizon?

I think Agony is what it is, it’s complete, there’s nothing we can add except for regular updates. Actually I feel very strongly about that. I hate to see really great projects ruined by constant tinkering, add-ons and embellishments. Since we launched the only significant change has been to add Confessions, frank self-interviews where each contributor reveals their sexual history and proclivities, which are often fascinating. We’ve started several other projects since Agony, including Ifeelmyself.com, which elevates the concept to complete nudity while still maintaining the emphasis on authenticity.